Winter Is Coming: Game of Thrones Gets a Mind-Blowing Minecraft Makeover

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Winter Is Coming: Game of Thrones Gets a Mind-Blowing Minecraft Makeover

Winter is coming. Unfortunately, the next season of HBO's Game of Thrones isn't arriving until the end of March, but luckily for those who can't wait for their next visit to Westeros, a couple of intrepid digital masons have helped build beautiful facsimiles of show's settings in Minecraft.
Will Blew and Jacob Granberry are the creators of WesterosCraft, a site devoted to recreating George R.R. Martin's universe, brick by brick. Both were fans of the novels and inspired by other Minecraft players who had built 1:1 versions of Hogwarts and Middle-earth. The duo started building and before long had raised an army of volunteer builders that would make Robb Stark proud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Sy9_A04_I

The low-resolution nature of Minecraft isn't that different from the Emmy-nominated opening credits for Game of Thrones. What's especially impressive is how attractive the models can be with a little rendering support. This low-resolution version of the wall uses the same data as the beautiful rendering that precedes it. Blew and Granberry produce these images in partnership with a talented but secretive 3-D artist named "Maruku."

The duo is also proud of their technical additions to the game. To accurately render Westeros, designers need to factor in the snowy lands surrounding Winterfell and Dornish heat, but in-game weather patterns could ruin their simulation. "We're proud about the details in WesterosCraft," Blew says, happily describing their approach. "If you look at our videos and images, every path through towns and from city to city is clear of snow. This is because we have a plugin that we developed and coded that prevents snow from falling on the types of blocks that we use for our roads. This allows us to use blocks that do allow snow as detailers to the paths so there is a little patch or snow here or a bunch near this hill. It's really all about the details with us and in order to do this we have had to make many adjustments like this to achieve the look and feel of such a great story."

Castle Dragonstone was the birthplace of the woman who would become khaleesi, but it also highlights the versatility of Minecraft as a CAD program. If it can convincingly capture the sinuous curves of dragons, there aren't many forms that it can't render. "Dragonstone was without a doubt the hardest build to get right," Granberry says. "Most of the castles in Westeros are rooted in realism, but Dragonstone is high fantasy, with towers and keeps shaped like dragons. It was a hard and frustrating task, and I believe every building was redone at least once. Besides Dragonstone, however, most of our builds lend themselves perfectly to the MineCraft format. Who hasn't attempted to build a castle in the game?"

Structures this detailed and a project this vast can't be completed by an individual, or even a small team. Blew and Granberry serve as virtual general contractors, planning and supervising thousands of workers who contribute to the construction in their realm. "Every single town, village, inn, castle, city, and notable location from the book series is divided into two groups: group builds and small builds," Granberry says. "Group builds are pre-planned and organized by a team of moderators on our server. A date and time is set for people to join and help build the project, and in the meantime an outline of the buildings is laid out in wool blocks in game, and a comprehensive post is submitted to our forums for builders to read up on. For the smaller builds, we allow builders to attempt them by themselves or with a small team, provided they follow strict proposal guidelines. All proposals are verified and approved by the mods. It's a pretty strict process, and our applications to even build on the server are strict, but it lets us make sure all of our projects are of the best quality."

George R.R. Martin's novels have been known to strain the attention of readers, but the team at WesterosCraft is pushing the envelope of Minecraft's technical performance capabilities.
"I would say that we are most proud of being able to support such a large map that also contains so many large structures," Blew says. "Most people think of Minecraft and say, 'Well, it's an infinite world so this must work easily' when they see our map. However, it has been a struggle to maintain the stability we need for so long due to Minecraft's use of Java and the resources that everything demands at the scale of our project. Our texture pack is community maintained and pretty much everyone can give input on what they think should be modified and why and we use a similar approval process as with builds to figure out what is best for the pack based on those opinions."

King's Landing is the pair's latest triumph. After creating a first draft they were unsatisfied with the lack of detail that Martin's multi-thousand page epic deserved. This version of the capital city of Westeros features over 2,000 unique and fully furnished buildings from the Red Keep to Littlefinger's pad. It took hundreds of hours over four months to complete. Blew says, "At this point I don't think that we could honestly give a accurate number of blocks, however our map with player data is around 58GB and our forums currently have 3,367 members."

The Iron Throne even makes an appearance in the simulation, though the seat of swords does suffer a bit from the inherently blocky nature of the software.

While Minecraft is well suited to making castles, not everything in a fantasy setting translates well.
"I'm not sure who, but someone on the server had the ingenious idea to make one of the railway track textures into a rope texture," Blew says. "This allows us to make ship rigging, and rope to hold down carts, among other uses. It makes our ships look so much more realistic and interesting. A bunch of the design details we've made involve re-texturing what we would consider 'useless' items in the game, such as flower pots into beer mugs, and brown wool into thatch/hay roofs."
Granberry warns, "Using our custom texture pack is a must when wandering around our server, a lot of things won't make sense without it."

While fans have months to wait before the next episodes air and years before the saga is complete, Blew and Granberry are moving forward every day. "We are currently working on our own NPC plugin that will allow our players to do quests and interact with the world in a manner similar to any MMORPG," Blew says. "This system will include original story lines, unique items, classes, and we will even have a web-based character-creation system."
And with the community assistance in putting their medieval masterpieces together in mind, they're also working on real-life goodwill by raising money for Child's Play, a charity founded by the team at Penny Arcade.